Fanta bottles in Britain, Italy, Poland, Finland, Romania, Serbia and Malta have a new look which make the bottles appear as if they have been freshly squeezed. The design element that gives the Fanta bottles this new look is a neatly executed spiral in the lower part of the bottle.At first glance it appears like a simple twirl on the bottle but PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottle packaging professionals will tell you that it is far from simple.
The idea was first bounced by London-based Ad agency, DrinkWorks to Coke UK who liked it and took it up. Little did Coke UK know that this cute and simple-looking design innovation would take over five years to materialize. They didn’t back out and pursued the idea to its logical end, and finally came up with the cute-looking squeezed and twirled shape on the Fanta bottle.
“How people interact with a product is where we start a project. We got young people in a room, gave them fruit, carving kits, plasticine, play-do, pens, paper, told them to just play—make a mess! Observing people do what comes naturally when they’re thinking of a drink and oranges like this was incredibly insightful,” says Leyton Hardwick, creative director at DrinkWorks. The only problem was, the youngsters aren’t expected to know that there is more pressure in a bottle that holds a carbonated beverage than there is in a car tire. Chances of the bottle deforming with certain sections popping out are high if the shape goes even slightly off kilter; that will render the bottle useless. Symmetry in design is critical here.
The kids had done their job; it was upto Coke UK’s packaging innovator, Gregory Bentley and his team to figure out a way to do it. He says, “The process of designing a bottle like this is very, very restrictive. We have multimillion-pound bottling production lines to think about. You’re working within a pre-agreed tube shape—if you pull capacity from one point, you need to add it in to another. You can’t take it out, without adding it in elsewhere. And of course, with a carbonated drink, the bottle has to be symmetrical, or it’ll bend.” Greg and his team deserves all the appreciation for achieving something incredible.